SafeWalk

Inspiration

One common problem that all of our team members share is the feeling of being uncomfortable when having to walk late at night or in unfamiliar areas. Oftentimes, local residents are the only ones that truly know the degree of safety of certain areas. So whether it was when Juliana had to walk late at night by herself after hanging out with friends, or when Ian accidentally walked through an unsafe neighborhood on his way home from an internship in California, the issue remains the same: lack of knowledge about the safety of certain areas is the main cause of stress and feelings of insecurity. SafeWalk leverages the information available from local communities for the promotion of public safety.

What it does

SafeWalk allows users to find out the areas that are more unsafe, due to lack of street lighting and/or increased crime. SafeWalk crowdsources the information of street lighting by allowing users to drop pins on certain locations on a map and connect the pin to a description of the area's lighting. The app uses the Everyblock API to search for articles related to local crime in an area and also drop these pins on their location.

How I built it

Challenges I ran into

Initially, we used GMSMapKit, but we ran into difficulties with running the code on all of our different laptops. We eventually figured out a solution to the GoogleMaps API because it allowed us to best showcase our product in the limited timeframe.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We successfully integrated Google Maps into our product so that users can find areas that are unsafe.

What I learned

I learned about rapid prototyping and product design. By collaborating with three other team members, we all learning the importance of using Git and communicating with each other to get our work done.

What's next for SafeWalk

Several of the features currently implemented could be polished up in the future, including the algorithm for finding several alternative safer path or finding the single safest path. In the future, we hope to incorporate Uber's service into our application so that if someone feels unsafe walking in a street, he/she is able to call an Uber directly from our app at ease. We could also add more specific options to the crowdsourcing features.